We Got Annie

There have been a number of quotable quips by Richards, but this AP article, Former Texas governor Ann Richards dies, has my favorite:

Asked what she might have done differently had she known she was going to be a one-term governor, Richards grinned.

"Oh, I would probably have raised more hell."

Having come up in the bad old days for career women (see here and here), Ann Richards was the kind of feisty role model that I admired and respected -- a sort of Helen Thomas in politics.

Judith Warner, who blogs at the NY Times, provides a fitting eulogy for those times and Ann Richards’s Big Life:

“A woman’s place is in the dome.”

The words today sound archaic, a tinny relic of a distant feminist past. But just 16 years ago, they had bite. They were fun. They triumphantly emblazoned a T-shirt with a picture of the Texas state capitol that Ann Richards held high on the day, in 1990, when she was elected governor.

It was a different time then. Feminism still felt alive. It produced “Backlash.” It gave us Anita Hill. And Hillary (yes – Hillary) and Bill, for that matter, and a whole climate of expectation and excitement and anticipation of change.

It was an era when Anna Quindlen could hear Richards give her famous “silver foot” speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention and come away feeling “proud as hell to be a woman.” Richards’s life trajectory – she was a former housewife and mother of four whose marriage had foundered when she entered politics – was the kind of story, then, that gave women a thrill. Many women of her generation had late-in-life careers. It felt real. Richards herself was real – as Quindlen put it in her “Life in the 30’s” column, “she was what men sometimes like to call a ‘real woman’ – pretty and dressed up and obviously good fun. And she was what women like to call a real woman, too – smart and not too perfect, a good ol’ girl, not an ice princess. The kind of woman who, just like you, keeps pantyhose with runs, to wear under slacks.”

Richards, looking back at the end of her single term in the governor’s office, talked about the lofty goals that had pushed her into politics, but also took pains to keep it all real. “I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house,’ ” she said.

It was an honest and clear-minded thought. An impolitic thought – much like Hillary Clinton’s 1992 admission that she wasn’t much for staying home and baking cookies. Yet, it was the kind of thought that virtually no one – politician or not – is likely to voice today. Not merely because of the immediate fallout that strikes anyone who does not sufficiently genuflect before the altar of Home. But because, I fear, in this generation, women have lost sight of certain simple truths: “a really clean house” (if you clean it yourself) is incompatible with a really big life.

* * * *

Ann Richards, Hillary Clinton – those women of that turbulent, transitional period of the 80’s into the 90’s – had it right. You can’t clean house and make it to “the dome” too. You can’t bake cookies and make it to the Senate. And that’s not just because there isn’t enough time. More profoundly, it’s because it just isn’t human to do all that. With all of our spouting off these days about the glorious variety of women’s Choice, there is one basic choice that we are not humanly able to make: we cannot choose what kind of people we are or what we are driven, drawn, destined to do. The best we can do is be ourselves – and stand up for what it takes to bring our self into being.

I hate to bake cookies. I will never have a neat house. And I am sick and tired of ruining my days – and my family’s for that matter – trying to be someone I am constitutionally incapable of being.

I want to be like Ann Richards, who in the later years of her life freed herself from the need to do things perfectly, relinquished the desire to be all things to all people, and focused, she said in a 2001 interview, on living a life filled with love, fun and work.

And as a final tribute to Ann Richards, a few excepts from Ann Richards on How to Be a Good Republican:

You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.

You have to believe God hates homosexuality, but loves the death penalty.

You have to be against government interference in business, until your oil company, corporation or Savings and Loan is about to go broke and you beg for a government bail out.

You love Jesus and Jesus loves you and, by the way, Jesus shares your hatred for AIDS victims, homosexuals, and President Clinton.

You have to believe government has nothing to do with providing police protection, national defense, and building roads.

You have to believe a poor, minority student with a disciplinary history and failing grades will be admitted into an elite private school with a $1,000 voucher.

(Photo and Quotes via My Left Wing)

UPDATE: And don't miss Molly Ivins on Remembering Ann Richards.

Tags: Politics, Quote of the Day, Ann Richards